The whales, dolphins, and porpoises (generally called "cetaceans") that we know today are fully aquatic mammals, spending their entire life in the water. Whereas the forelimbs of these hydrodynamic animals are transformed into flippers, mostly used for steering, their hind limbs are highly reduced, and... click to read more

Discussions about the evolution of multicellularity tend to focus on animals and plants, but there have actually been at least 25 independent origins of multicellularity in the history of life on this planet, including fungi, slime molds, several groups of algae, cyanobacteria and myxobacteria. So... click to read more

Being almost 300 million years old, the extinct Orobates pabsti did not know that at some point in the future, engineers and biologists would have reconstructed its fossilized bones into a robot to study how it used to walk and thus, learn more things about... click to read more

Even though that there are more than 20,000 species of bees worldwide, the word "bee" often invokes images of a hive-dwelling, golden-liquid-generating insect. Although honey bees have been stealing the spotlight for quite some time, most bee species are wild, unmanaged, and do not produce... click to read more

The phenomenon of plant groups originating in the tropics was observed by botanist George Ledyard Stebbins in 1973. He hypothesized that ecosystems in equatorial regions serve as "evolutionary cradles" that spawn new lineages at higher rates compared to ecosystems at higher latitudes. Especially those demanding... click to read more